Thank you very much for the opportunity to read and review Cloud Cuckoo Land. Unfortunately, this book was not for me. I tried about 3 times to get into this, made it about 15% in and just could not connect with anyone in the story. While I appreciate what Doerr is trying to do with the three timelines it was just a bit too much for me.

Thank you again for the opportunity.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for granting me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Where do I even begin with Cloud Cuckoo Land? It is extremely well written, complete and great story-telling. There are numerous characters, not only in different countries, but different time periods ranging from the 1400's to distant years in the future. At first, it can seem a little daunting with all of these story lines to keep up with, but the characters are easily distinguishable from one another and have such captivating stories.

Cloud Cuckoo Land will be one of those books where it seems like almost everyone has a different interpretation of what the "message" is. I believe that's part of the beauty of Cloud Cuckoo Land is that it is MEANT to be interpreted differently for different people. This is a dense, "Big Brain" book, but I say that with all of the best intentions. If you are looking for a soft, fluff book while sipping drinks on the beach, this is not it. My only criticism with the book is that I felt toward the very end it was becoming a bit long-winded and I was ready for it to wrap up a little sooner than it did.

I've already recommended this book to one friend, and will continue to do so for others!

Doerr has crafted an ambitious novel that spans centuries, marking the inside with a plethora of characters. The dedication lays out an inscription, "For the librarians, then, now, and in years to come." Beyond that Doerr also explores climate change in the book's periphery, but the main thread stays with the transformative power and impact of the written word and the stories passed down.

"Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes."

The idea from this quote that appears fairly early on in Cloud Cuckoo Land seems to be the crux of the entire book, the idea upon which the whole novel pivots — no matter the time period in which it takes place. Doerr has two characters, Anna and Omeir, whose storylines converge during the fall of Constantinople at the time of the Ottoman invasion. Another set of characters, Zeno and Seymour, have a connection that tethers the novel in present day (2019), while also developing the characters through flashbacks of both their childhoods (and adulthood with Zeno, as he is in his eighties in 2019) — and which displays one of my main contentions with the stories. Finally, Doerr's most purposeful character, Konstance, whose storyline is set in the not-too-distant future aboard Argos, a spacecraft housing vestiges of Earth: seeds, information, and people. And still smattered throughout are excerpts from a translation attempt from Zeno Ninis for Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes.

Doerr's writing is as beautiful as ever. Thinking through his various storylines individually, they felt masterfully constructed and injected with his imagination — shining with potential. But from the very beginning, this book was so packed with severely segmented, julienned stories, that I never managed to hold onto any of them. Wet vegetables, laid out like matchsticks — slippery and elusive and terrible for solid construction. And soon enough, I struggled to care.

And on top of it all, the damn thing was in present tense.

"It's never easy. Past tense literally causes him back pain, the way it flings all the verbs into the dark. Then there's the aorist tense, a tense unbound by time, that makes him want to crawl into a closet and huddle in the darkness." Zeno, trying his hand at translation of old text, briefly mentions what I think has a lot of the author in him here. It displays a similar reaction I have to present tense. It literally makes my frontal lobes ache. My forehead protests. It's a visceral reaction that can sometimes be overcome — depending on how and why (and when) it is used by an author. I hated it here. Maybe I could forgive it in Konstance's story — and maybe I could forgive it in the present day portion of Zeno's and Seymour's encounter. But not the whole book. I'm exhausted by present tense. Dip into it now and then, but all of one book cannot and should not exist in the now, the immediate.

It's like watching a mime perform the ol' stuck in an invisible box trick, while a little voice over my shoulder delivers, in a near-whisper, narration like a golf commentator. Pretty soon it becomes noise. Gimmicky noise. I get the desire to pin the story from the mid-15th century to now, bring it into today, trying to make it feel real and tangible. I understand it, but I don't like that this is the only way authors sometimes feel it can be accomplished. It's a poor substitute for actually fulfilling this goal through the actual words.

While I found Konstance's story the most compelling, it was also the most obvious one — feeling more "M. Night Shyamalan" by the end than was probably the intention. I lost interest in the converging storylines from Constantinople by halfway through and skimmed those for the most part. Picking up when it felt necessary or when I hoped it might be. And though I did enjoy the majority of Zeno's whole story — some of his wartime was far too drawn out — Zeno felt less and less like a flesh-and-blood person as the book neared the end. Which brings me to Seymour.

I adored both boys' childhoods. Really. Doerr is wonderful with these two young characters, but the demand of his overall plot causes these two to be thinned out and watered down.

Seymour is introduced very early on — so this is not a spoiler; it's at 2% on my Kindle – as a young adult with a bomb in his backpack. His plan is, by use of the adjacent wall from the library's side, to destroy part of the realty office next door. This plan predictably goes awry when a helpful library associate tries to return the loaded backpack back to Seymour. Seymour, like Zeno, has his development displayed through the utilization of flashbacks. In those flashbacks, we see a Seymour who clearly is displaying something akin to being on the autism spectrum — it's just never stated absolutely.

He doesn't like loud noises, gets easily overstimulated, lashes out, wanders off, and —once discovered— makes use of some gun-range ear protection headset to quiet his head and calm him. Later he is on medication. I hated everything about making this kid a villain, making him a dupe and the troubled mental health patient who has this potential for great harm. It's exactly the wrong narrative to continue to spin and I cannot find any reason for it. This was unforgivable.

Though Doerr managed to capture my attention in the wonderful All the Light We Cannot See — which was written in present tense and which was easier to accept because of the understanding that comes with the threat of Nazis as has been absolutely ingrained in our collective consciousness — I'm not sure I will be so apt to jump willingly into his next work.

Thank you Netgalley for the advanced copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land. This book is not my typical genre and it took a bit for me to get into and at times a bit hard to follow..
Set in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.

Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

A puzzling story centered around an ancient manuscript telling the tale of Aethon and its effect on children in different places and centuries.

The book has three alternating stories tied together by the ancient Antonius Diogenes tale, Cloud Cuckoo Land. We meet two people in 15th century Constantinople, two people in 20th & 21st century Idaho, and a final character at some point in the future on an interstellar ship escaping our ruined planet. I found it very easy to get involved with each of the main characters, although it took a bit to understand what was happening. I found all of the settings fascinating and the characters complex and interesting.

Beautiful writing by one of my favorite authors.

“Cloud cuckoo land is a state of absurdly, over-optimistic fantasy or an unrealistically idealistic state where everything is perfect. Someone who is said to "live in cloud cuckoo land" is a person who thinks that things that are completely impossible might happen, rather than understanding how things really are.”-Wikipedia

Anthony Doerr is a brilliant magician. A sorcerer of sentence structure. A wizard of word choice. He waves a wand and lyrical stories are created for readers to escape into. It may have taken him 10 years to pen All The Light We Cannot See, and another 7 to publish this one, but both were worth the wait. Once again I found myself re-reading passages for the sheer beauty contained in is storytelling. I requested this ARC based on loving his previous two books, and this was unlike anything I’ve ever read. At over 600 pages it’s almost like having 3 books in one, as he weaves a fictional tale about an ancient writer’s story of desiring to live as a bird in a mystical Cloud Cuckoo Land through 5 sets of characters in 3 different time periods; 1400 Constantinople, current day Idaho, and a futuristic space travel machine. Bazaar, right? Odd and nonconforming? It was. But it was also thoroughly engrossing and at its center was the importance and power of passing down and preserving stories so that they never die.

Pub Day for this one is at the end of the month and I anticipate it will generate a lot of buzz. Wholly original and epic in its breadth and dimension.

I had a hard time getting into this novel for the first 50% of the story. The second half, when things become a little clearer and start coming together is when the narrative got much more interesting for me.

We start out with six characters from varying times and places, including an ancient text that may or may not have been translated correctly and in proper order, and it isn’t apparent how these are all related. The first half of the book, jumps in time and place. To add to the confusion, two of the characters storylines jump between the present and their pasts. For this reason I think it might even be more confusing if one listens to the story as an audiobook. I had to continually refer back to the chapter headings for dates and the overall chronology.

This story though filled with a lot of sadness, is thought provoking. So many novels these days have an underlying environmental message built in to the story. Genre: environmental fiction? It also seems to be popular right now to write one book containing several character’s stories that are then brought together at the end. For me, this resulted in not knowing enough of each character’s story (with the exception of Zeno who I felt was most focused on) and then an incredibly fast slippery-slope wrap up at the end. Omeir and Anna’s story in particular felt a little shorted.

But I enjoyed the second half, and it was interesting to see how everyone’s stories came together, and progressed into the future. I do recommend this with the warning that it starts out a bit confusing.

This has been, correctly I feel, compared to Cloud Atlas.

A rich and complex book that's brilliantly written. The novel takes place across different timelines and multiple points of view. Rich world building, inspiring. Elements of magic, fantasy, and sci-fi. Definitely an innovative premise and a thought provoking story, different than anything I've read in awhile.

I tried to like this book. At one-third of the way, I decided that I couldn’t finish reading it. I loved All The Light We Cannot See by this author and that is why I chose to read this novel. If you are a fan of mythology, fantasy and sci-fi you should read it. Three time periods are featured starting in 1452, current and ending in the future. No doubt this book will be highly rated, though these genres are not books I choose to read.

Before reading "Cloud Cuckoo Land," I thought it was impossible for Anthony Doerr to reach the heights he did in "All the Light We Cannot See" for a second time. I was very wrong. This book is the PERFECT book for the moment, when we need some hope to cling to in a world that seems like it's falling apart.

I was reminded of David Mitchell's masterpiece, "Cloud Atlas"... Multiple storylines across vast stretches of time. Sometimes that can be a chore to read, because authors will go on and on for one plot line and I will forget what was happening in the other ones. Doerr keeps the pace brisk, and the book is actually quite thrilling! I had heard that it was a dramedy before reading. I guess that could be someone's take on it, but I was very stressed out through several parts (anything with a bomb freaks me out) and VERY moved by the ending.

Anthony Doerr's writing is SO emotional. I didn't like this book, I LOVE LOVE LOVED it. I am going to purchase a ticket to the Zoom interview/signed book from Barnes and Noble because I want this book on my shelf. I will HAPPILY recommend this book to anyone who will listen. I am going to add my Instagram book review, but I am posting new book reviews on their release days, so I haven't posted it yet. It won't be this exact review (I usually add a plot description) but it will be a rave review.

Wow! This book is so different! It is beautifully written, as the story weaves in and out. It is intricately put together as each character plays an important part, the importance of which the reader cannot be sure until almost the very end.

Anna and Omeir live in the 1400’s. Anna finds the story of Aethon, a man who dreams of becoming a bird so that he can fly. She reads this book to her dying sister. She saves and protects the book because it is so special to her. Omeir is an oxen driver. He and Anna will meet.

In 2020, 86-year-old Zeno and five local children are practicing a play based on Aethon’s story at the public library. Zeno has translated the play from the original Greek and has a special love for it. However, Seymour steps into the picture and creates his own special havoc.

Sometime in the future, Konstance lives on an interstellar ship. Her father tells her the story of Aethon, with which she falls in love. However, there is much more that Konstance finds out as she looks for more clues about the story of Aethon and where her father got his own information about the book.

The whole book is bound together by how this story travels through time and its importance to the people that it touches. But there is so much more to it than that.
There is mystery and drama and love and romance, and it is told in such a way that the reader is carried away right up until the last page.

So good! I highly recommend it!

I'd like to thank NetGalley, Anthony Doerr, and Scribner for the advanced reader's copy in exchange for my unbiased review.

This book is magical and mesmerizing – but don’t start it until you have time to pick it up and continue reading on consecutive days. While Doerr’s last book, All the Light We Cannot See, was a slowly building narrative, Cloud Cuckoo Land has multiple storylines, and if you allow too much time to elapse between sessions, it may be difficult to recall prior content. One by one, Doerr introduces us to several children, all located in different parts of the world and separated by centuries. As time passes, we follow these children, all dealing with significant hardships that present conflicts, and the adults in their lives, as they navigate radically different existences.

Providing the “glue” for all these narratives are two premises – the importance of preserving written accounts of humanity’s stories, long after those lives have ended, and the timeless “searching” of mankind for a better world, as in the classic Greek tale of Ulysses embarking on a journey to find a Paradise. Doerr then unites the threads of this book by having his young characters escape from their confined lives through exposure to the world of books and imagination, and by inserting, in small pieces, a mythical ancient Greek manuscript that describes the central character’s quest to find another Utopia, Cloud Cuckoo Land.


I found Doerr’s writing so beautifully lyrical and descriptive that I frequently needed to pause, close my eyes, and visualize what I had just read, assembling all his phrases like layers of colors that created vivid paintings. I also welcomed these pauses since the stories contained considerable menace, and I was frequently happy to escape the tension. However, at the same time, I was so captivated by the tales and eager to continue moving forward that my self-imposed intermissions were brief. While I occasionally felt that the inserted sections of the ancient manuscript interrupted the primary story flow, in hindsight I see that these fantastical and fanciful sections functioned effectively to moderate the book’s pace.


With a mixture of myth, fact, and fantasy, Cloud Cuckoo Land touches on so many timely topics.
Doerr writes without any obvious ideology or morality lessons, but this may be a cautionary tale, and he subtly reveals areas which deserve some intellectual scrutiny. Over all these centuries, humanity is still searching for other lands to conquer, better places to build homes, augmented or artificial reality that may be better than the real thing, and other planets that might be better than Earth.
Will acquiring the ability to accomplish these things give us more useable wisdom, or just give us more control over facts which creates the impression of more “power” but does not really enrich our lives? What defines humanity, and will it always be searching for something better?

Doerr provides neither the actual questions nor the answers, but like Ulysses and other Greek protagonists, readers will embark on a remarkable journey while reading this book, and upon finishing, will no doubt be thinking … “What if…..?”

This was a DNF (did not finish) for me, and that’s okay! This book pushed the boundaries between historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, Greek mythology and thriller. There’s three different timelines - all with multiple characters in them. I think this book could be really interesting, but I didn’t have the focus to read it yet. The descriptions and the depth of this book deserve quiet time and processing, and that’s not something I have in my current stage of life. I’ll probably try again later, but it was a lot.

As my first Anthony Doerr book, I didn't know quite what to expect with his writing, world building, etc. besides the positive reviews of All the Light We Cannot See, but I can officially state that it was incredible. I didn't know how these multiple POVs over centuries of timeline would fit together (in a good way at that), but again, Doerr pulled it off.
By far, Konstance just stole my attention with her experiences within space (or is it? haha) and her dynamics day to day. It was the most unique and different of the POVs because space is something I'll never experience, and while the end definitely throws some wrenches into our perception of her time within the Argos, I cannot wait for others to read it.
The other POVs held like a dual perspective in many ways of one event from Anna and Omeir to Seymour and Zeno. Doerr's plotting prowess really shines through all of these individual stories. It was magnificent to watch unfold.
Now something I wasn't quite expecting to be so heavily centered within this world was, indeed, the discussion over climate change. It mostly occurs during Seymour's POV, but it was interesting and enthralling to read his perspective, especially when we come to 2020. It is before COVID truly hit the US, and I think it gave me a new appreciation and viewpoint of this period because really only COVID is discussed within the scope of the year. There's only a few other topics that come up, but I remember the fires and other natural events that shook our world from the start. I like that more fictional books are entering the discussion of climate change, and I think Doerr definitely leaves his own feelings and interpretations by comparing Seymour to even Konstance.
Obviously, the thing I want to discuss most is the ending for Konstance and Cloud Cuckoo Land. All I can reference to it, without spoilers, is the pure satisfaction at the revelations. It was interesting and truly something I didn't see coming till the actual actions were made.
I'd recommend this book to anyone from historical fiction fans to sci-fi and even activists. It has such a wide audience and will definitely steal a lot of readers attention.

In the first few chapters of Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, I wasn't quite sure about the book: how did all these disparate stories, set centuries apart, come together? That turned out to be the beauty of this novel. As I kept reading, I began to see each story's separate thread weave together into one stunning tableau. Each narrator's story was told so vividly — I really felt I was climbing into crumbling towers in Constantinople with Anna and stuck inside the futuristic walls of the Argos with Konstance. The undercurrent in each character's story was the lost Greek comedy of Diogenes. Seeing how one text rescued from a moldering tower impacted each character's life — decades or even centuries later — turned out to be a moving meditation on the passage of time.

Anthony Doerr's new book is an absolute tour-de-force. It addresses alienation, human desire, climate change, and the redemptive power of stories. He deftly juggles one story in present day Idaho, one unfolding during the 1453 siege of Constantinople, another aboard an interstellar spaceship years in the future, as well as the survival of an ancient Greek manuscript. This novel of ideas has compelling characters and is an homage to the humble, brave custodians of the written word, Cloud Cuckoo Land is big in scope and big in heart.

Too blessed long and not interesting enough. The writing is amazing of course but I found myself not caring what happens next.

It's been 7 years since AD's massive success, ‘All the Light We Cannot See,’ so I was immensely interested in seeing how this next novel would follow up to that kind of pressure and expectation.

While there is a lot about this that reminded me of my reading experience with ‘All the Light We Cannot See,’ it's very apparent this story feels drastically more ambitious. And I think a story like this has to be. Such an ode to the art of storytelling and the profession of storykeeping deserves to be a grand gesture.

While reading, I was definitely drawn to some POVs more than others, particularly Anna and Omeirs. It wasn't until the end, when I could see how everyone was connected, that I fully appreciated the other characters and their chapters. It was such a rewarding feeling witnessing how a simple story could be spread throughout time, impacting individuals and, in turn, impacting others.

Overall, I think fans of literary fiction and lovers of stories will really value this particular novel.

The Magical Story of Aethon

This is a story of a magical ancient Greek storybook that passes through many hands and translations. It involves three different time periods and four main characters.

It starts in 15th century Constantinople when a young girl named Anna finds it in an ancient ruins. The story continues the trail of the book with Zeno a Vet of the Korean War and Seymour a young man in Idaho, and finally a young girl named Konstance in a stellar spaceship named Argos.

Each of the stories unfold with the events of that era that take place with the characters in that time period and the magical story of Aethon.

You will travel through different time periods and different changes in the land, the people and the environment. The story carries you through war and peace, Love and hate, and never far away from the magical story.

The book was very well written and a magical story in itself, It was easy to navigate between the different time periods, and although each was a story in itself they all fitted together. In that being said, the book was very long and the words were also very long. I did have a hard time reading it. I feel like I have memorized the story from it being read over and over again in each segment of the book, a bit repetitious with that part of the story.

Thanks to Anthony Doerr, Scribner Publishing, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a complimentary copy of the book for my honest review.

Such an immersive story. I loved the different story lines and how it made me think deeply about the environment and our purpose in life. I highly recommend this book.